


legato

by Previously8



Category: Given (Anime), Given (Manga)
Genre: Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Ritsuka is a Good Boyfriend, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:33:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24616876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Previously8/pseuds/Previously8
Summary: legato: (Italian: 'joined'). An instruction indicating that a sequence of notes should be played smoothly, or joined up, as opposed to disconnected.Or, Mafuyu knows before he opens his eyes that it’s not going to be a good day.
Relationships: Past Satou Mafuyu/Yoshida Yuki, Satou Mafuyu/Uenoyama Ritsuka
Comments: 9
Kudos: 201





	legato

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all! Given both ruined my life and healed me so i wrote a bunch of oneshots... but only refound them recently! this was originally a 1.3k thing, but then Mafuyu kept having feelings and Ritsuka kept being a good boyfriend so now it's like almost twice that? who would have guessed
> 
> he doesn't make an appearance, but references to Yuki's characterization come from canon and from my favourite Given fic of all time [i can tell my love for you is still going strong (even after the songs of summer are sung)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21611434) by driedupwishes.
> 
> anyway warnings for this fic include: referenced character death (Yuki), depressive episode (Mafuyu has a bad day)

Mafuyu knows before he opens his eyes that it’s not going to be a good day. 

He spends a few minutes with his eyes closed, tracing the orange-red-yellow patterns on the insides of his eyelids and letting his blanket hold him into the mattress. There is a weight to his bones, on days like this. His ribs are made of iron, anchoring him to the bed and bound tight around the grief he still keeps caged. 

He can’t get up. He doesn’t want to get up. In some ways, they are the same thing. He shuts his eyes tighter, then forces them open, so he can stare up at the white ceiling and think of nothing. His mind feels like it’s full of cotton. He can’t seem to grasp any thought as they slide through him, so just tries to remember to breathe, instead. It’s almost enough.

At the edge of wakefulness, he can almost feel the shape, the warmth of Yuki in bed next to him, but when he turns his head, it’s to face an empty pillow. 

A door slams in the distance, some undetermined amount of time later. His phone alarm for school rings, but he doesn’t bother turning it off. It rings and rings on his bedside table before falling silent. 

Mafuyu closes his eyes to the world again. 

His bladder gets him out of bed, eventually. Once it’s taken care of, he spends a long minute staring in the mirror. He doesn’t recognize himself any more today than he usually does. He meets his own eyes and tries to find some life behind them but finds them vacant instead. Hollow. He wonders if other people can see it too, how scraped raw he feels in his grief on days like this.

He turns away. 

Back in bed, he sends a text to his mother—she’s already long gone to work, he’s sure. It’s almost noon. If that least this way, if the school calls her, she’ll know where he is. 

(Once she heard that Yuki was gone, she showed her devastation by hovering around Mafuyu as though that could protect him from any more hurt. For long weeks, she was constantly checking in on him, texting him every hour that he was out of the house, sleeping in front of his door. 

Mafuyu understands why she did. He knows that his mother used to be close with Yuki’s mom too, that Saeko-san had called his mother after he hung up, that day. 

He couldn’t find gratefulness at the time. In retrospect, he knows that it saved him, those first few weeks, that she was there.)

Grief is a funny thing.

It is easier, often, on the days when there are other things do to: band practice to attend, friends to see, dogs to walk. All of the many things his mother and Saeko-san pushed him info after the funeral, kept his mind busy when he felt like he was floating away. Other times, even despite all of the things he could do, Mafuyu only feels empty. Today is one of those days. 

He closes his eyes again, tries to block out the world. 

(Sometimes, Mafuyu doubts that Yuki would want him to have the guitar at all. Saeko-san might have insisted, in her own grief. At the time, she hadn’t wanted to have to hold anything that Yuki loved, not his precious guitar and certainly not his boyfriend. 

It was an unintended cruelty, Mafuyu thinks, to give him a guitar that he couldn’t play and was broken by his own hands. It was an unexpected kindness. It made the grief both worse and better.)

Many days, Mafuyu’s grief the lingering sadness of faded photographs, tastes on his tongue that he’ll never have again, old text conversations that he reads over and over trying to find new words and deeper meaning. It’s an ever-present, lingering sadness, the kind of ache that he might never really get rid of, and it’s worsened when someone asks. The sadness is self-feeding and impossible to escape. 

More often, there’s the feeling of a hole, in Mafuyu’s chest: he feels empty, scooped out, eviscerated, like he had the day Yuki’s mother said the words to him over the phone: the disbelief, the horror, a blank emptiness so cold and all encompassing that he isn’t sure what to do with himself. 

He’s been dealing with the hole in his chest so long, he barely remembers himself without it. On the worst days, like today, he feels like maybe he died too. Whatever afterimage he’s pretending to be is a mockery of what he was. He’s a shell, hollow, worthless.

Yuki wouldn’t want to see him like this. He’d needle and poke and cajole and prod until Mafuyu got up, grinning right up until he was actually annoyed.

Mafuyu presses the heels of his hands into his closed eyes, so that the patterns on the back of his eyelids hide the image of last time he saw Yuki smile. 

It doesn’t really work. 

It’s the mid afternoon before he checks his phone again. There are four missed messages from Ritsuka. Mafuyu hates that the idea of answering exhausts him. Guilt lodges itself in his stomach next to the hole in his chest.

He puts down his phone without reading them and closes his eyes. A few tears fall anyway. 

At least he can cry, now. The first few weeks, the emptiness in him hadn’t even let him have that. That was when his mother was the most worried. He wouldn’t—couldn’t talk to Hiiragi or Shizu-chan, worried they blamed him, worried they’d be right to. He didn’t speak, to them, or anyone, for a week after Yuki died. He had closed his door, hadn’t eaten for days. His mother had knocked and knocked, and curled herself into a ball in front of the door to sleep at night. 

(He’d found her like that, one night as he left to go to the bathroom. She’d woken, and blinked up at him, tired and drained. The carpet had left an impression on her cheek. They weren’t a family of huge talkers, the two of them, but his mom had whispered into the silence between them, “please, Mafuyu, tell me what I can do for you.” 

He couldn’t find the words to fix it, to fix himself, to fix anything, but the next night, he left a pillow outside of his door. It was one of the only times he’s ever seen his mother cry.) 

With tears at the corners of his eyes, salt tracks down his cheeks, and a lump in his throat, he drifts off again.

He wakes to his door cracking open. He blinks blearily, “M-Mom?” His throat is dry from dehydration, his voice cracks from disuse. He blinks and realizes his guess was wrong. 

“Not quite,” Ritsuka says, stepping in and closing the door softly behind him. “She’s still at work.” He fidgets, standing just inside Mafuyu’s doorway, looking unsure. “She said I could drop by.”

He must have used the spare key under the mat to get in, Mafuyu thinks slowly. The cotton in his head hasn’t left, he still feels bleary and confused. It’s after school, but just barely—Ritsuka must have hurried over. Mafuyu closes his eyes again, worried he’ll start crying without knowing why. The hole in his chest gapes. The guilt chokes him. 

“Is it okay if I sit?” Ritsuka asks. 

Usually, Mafuyu would tease him, say of course, silly, how many times have you been here already? He doesn’t have it in him to tease. He mumbles assent, his voice rough and throat dry. Ristuka takes a seat on the mat by the bed, pulling out some homework, but if the sounds are anything to go by, he doesn’t start writing right away. Mafuyu doesn’t open his eyes to check. 

Mafuyu hates that Ritsuka has to see him like this.

Ritsuka likes him for his passion, he knows, for the things he says without thinking first, for the words he puts to lyrics, for his willingness to learn. He has seen broken-Mafuyu before, of course. But he’s never seen this empty-Mafuyu. He wonders what Ritsuka is thinking, whether his face is pulled into a frown, like Mafuyu is a puzzle he just has to solve. He wonders whether Ritsuka is mad at him, for not being a better boyfriend today, for being an empty, rotten person. 

Yuki would have been mad. He would have dragged Mafuyu up, despite protests, and pulled him along on some weird adventure. He would have fixed Mafuyu as best he could, like it was his personal mission. No lazing about on his watch, not when there were things to see and places to go and people to be—

But not anymore. There’s no one Yuki will be anymore, because the only bits left of him are scents and pictures and old text messages. 

Mafuyu kind of hates Yuki for that.

Mafuyu hates himself more for even thinking that way. 

Hate is the first thing Mafuyu can feel all day besides the heavy guilt of being useless, and he hates that too. He feels like the hole in his chest, the emptiness in his mind has been filled up with mud, slop and disgusting shit, hatred clogging his arteries and turning him into a monster. If it’s wrong to hate anyone, it’s worse to hate the dead, isn’t it?

“Hey, Mafuyu?” Ritsuka’s voice is soft in the quiet and breaks Mafuyu out of his muddy thoughts. Mafuyu squints his eyes open, just barely. Ritsuka has homework in his lap, but no pencil in sight. “Oh,” he says, when he meets Mafuyu’s eyes. Mafuyu doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean. “I wanted to ask if you were—okay. You looked angry. I mean, not okay-okay. Of course you’re not—”

“It’s fine,” Mafuyu says, cutting off Ritsuka’s embarrassed mumbling. He blinks, and it feels like an eternity. The hatred is gone; emptiness has returned with a vengeance, the guilt lodges in his throat. His voice is still embarrassingly rough, after a day in bed. Ritsuka offers him his water bottle. Mafuyu’s arms feel heavy, sluggish, but he takes it and has a sip anyway. Ritsuka smiles at him, kindly.

“Why are you here?” he mumbles, looking at his clenched hands around Ritsuka’s water bottle rather than his boyfriend’s face. He has calluses on his fingers now too, just like Yuki, just like Ritsuka. 

“You were having a bad day,” Ritsuka says. He sounds nervous. It’s no wonder, really, since his boyfriend is currently a puddle rather than a human being. “I wanted to be—here for you. If you needed anything.” He pauses, then asks carefully, “do you want anything?”

Mafuyu twists his fingers. Need, want. Two difficult words. What he needs is easy—he needs to get some good sleep, for once, he needs to eat something, to drink more water. What he wants is harder—he wants Yuki never to have left, never to have gone somewhere Mafuyu couldn’t follow. That desire, though, comes with the difficult caveat that he never would have gotten the Gibson, never would have needed strings, never would have met Ritsuka—something he also doesn’t want to give up. How can he want something and not want it at the same time? How can everything he wants be cruel to someone else?

He goes with something he needs, instead of trying to puzzle that one any further. “Do you have a granola bar?” he asks quietly. His stomach punctuates his request with a loud growl. 

Ritsuka rummages in his bag and emerges with a wrapped sweet bun. “This okay?”

“Mm,” Mafuyu manages. Ritsuka opens the packaging and hands it to him. Their fingers don’t touch. Mafuyu wishes they would. 

“Anything else?” He sounds—eager, nervous, apprehensive. 

Mafuyu wants to say—bring Yuki back, go away, let me die here in my bed so I never have to think of anything ever again. 

He has lots of cruel words under his tongue and just as many lies. He could be mean in this moment, he could be mean like Yuki could be mean, use his words to poke where it would hurt the most, just so he could apologize and pull him back. He doesn’t want to be cruel. He knows that Ritsuka is—trying, right now, to deal with this, just like he is. Mafuyu could lie, could probably push himself down enough to ask for things he didn’t want, just to make Ritsuka happy. 

“Just—stay,” Mafuyu says, finally. “I’d like your company.”

It’s the truth. Some day, it might not be. He wonders what Ritsuka will do then, when all Mafuyu wants him to do is leave. 

“Of course,” Ritsuka says quickly. He smiles a small smile, kind, honest, _loving_. “Can I hold your hand?”

His cheeks turn pink at the words. It’s adorable, really, and Mafuyu nods. He moves his hand out from under the covers. Ritsuka takes it immediately, entwining it gently with his warm hands. A callused thumb rubs a small circle over Mafuyu’s knuckle, squeezes once. 

“Thanks,” he says. Mafuyu must look as confused as he feels because Ritsuka looks down at their interlaced hands. “For letting me be here. I know you’re—dealing with a lot of things. I’m just,” he pauses like he’s trying to find words. “I’m just grateful, that I can be here for you.” His eyes, dark and lovely, meet Mafuyu’s. “So, thanks.”

Mafuyu’s eyes feel wet again but his tears don’t fall. 

Grief is terrible. It’s soul-devouring and all-consuming and it comes in waves so that just when you think you’re alright, you aren’t again. It doesn’t mean Mafuyu will never be okay again, but for now, it’s still difficult to breathe around the hole where Yuki used to be. 

Sharing it with other people, Mafuyu is finding, makes it easier. 

Mafuyu squeezes Ritsuka’s hand gently back.

**Author's Note:**

> okay i feel like i need to say something here which is this: Mafuyu expresses a few times in this fic that he feels it's wrong to speak badly of the dead. for the record, i disagree. i think it's not only healthy, but important, to remember people as they were in life, which means not just the good parts. no one is perfect, in life or in death, and it's not wrong to have mixed feelings about someone who has passed away. 
> 
> anyway, I hope you liked it! please leave a comment if you did <3 it would mean a lot
> 
> you can find me on tumblr [@everythingsdifferentupsidedown](https://everythingsdifferentupsidedown.tumblr.com)!


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